This comparative study explores the gendered dynamics of textile labour in Bombay’s cotton mills and Biella’s woollen mills through the lens of Global South feminist materialism, focusing on double colonisation where women face simultaneous capitalist production and patriarchal reproduction. Official archives systematically erased women’s contributions, classifying their wages as “supplementary” and confining them to “unskilled” roles (Lanzillo and Kumar, 2021), thereby maintaining the illusion of gender-neutral productivity. This framework opposes conventional methodology that prioritises market rationality over a holistic view of human needs (Kabeer 1994, 84). Drawing on “situated knowledges” (Haraway 1988) and subaltern subjectivity (Spivak 2004), the study re-centres women’s experience using oral histories (One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices [2004]; In greggio e in fino [2004]). These testimonies show women crafting negotiated autonomy (Kabeer 1994, 127) through collective infrastructures like childcare networks and khanaval kitchens in Bombay's chawls and acts of infrapolitics (Scott 1990) in Biella. The study challenges Western feminism’s universalism (Mohanty 1984), which often misreads such practices as passivity, a tendency that risks portraying non-Western oppression as “death by culture” (Narayan 1997, 81). Instead, it uses Ardhanarishvara (Sanga 2004) to conceptualise labour as the dialectical unity of production and reproduction, offering a decolonial alternative to performative individualism (Butler 1988). Resistance emerges through culturally embedded acts of interdependence. The shuttle’s rhythm, moving between constraint and agency, becomes a metaphor for a Global South feminist materialism rooted in the textured, embodied struggles of working women.
Threads of Resistance: Feminist Materialism and the Labour of Double Colonisation in Bombay and Biella Textile Mills
Harjot Banga
2026-01-01
Abstract
This comparative study explores the gendered dynamics of textile labour in Bombay’s cotton mills and Biella’s woollen mills through the lens of Global South feminist materialism, focusing on double colonisation where women face simultaneous capitalist production and patriarchal reproduction. Official archives systematically erased women’s contributions, classifying their wages as “supplementary” and confining them to “unskilled” roles (Lanzillo and Kumar, 2021), thereby maintaining the illusion of gender-neutral productivity. This framework opposes conventional methodology that prioritises market rationality over a holistic view of human needs (Kabeer 1994, 84). Drawing on “situated knowledges” (Haraway 1988) and subaltern subjectivity (Spivak 2004), the study re-centres women’s experience using oral histories (One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices [2004]; In greggio e in fino [2004]). These testimonies show women crafting negotiated autonomy (Kabeer 1994, 127) through collective infrastructures like childcare networks and khanaval kitchens in Bombay's chawls and acts of infrapolitics (Scott 1990) in Biella. The study challenges Western feminism’s universalism (Mohanty 1984), which often misreads such practices as passivity, a tendency that risks portraying non-Western oppression as “death by culture” (Narayan 1997, 81). Instead, it uses Ardhanarishvara (Sanga 2004) to conceptualise labour as the dialectical unity of production and reproduction, offering a decolonial alternative to performative individualism (Butler 1988). Resistance emerges through culturally embedded acts of interdependence. The shuttle’s rhythm, moving between constraint and agency, becomes a metaphor for a Global South feminist materialism rooted in the textured, embodied struggles of working women.
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